[MUD-Dev] Quake II has gone GPL

[Valerio Santinelli]

From: "Frank Crowell" <frankc at maddog.com>
> From: "Jeremy Noetzelman" <jjn at kriln.com>\

>> Another place you can effectively use it is as a tech demo
>> platform to attract investors/publishers.  GG effectively doesn't
>> care what you do with whatever you make as long as you a) have a
>> license for each developer, and b) don't charge for it.  When you
>> start charging, then you start hitting the meat of the contract.

> I would like to see how much someone could do with the SDK.  If
> the whole engine, server, client is available, then you are right
> it would make an interesting demo/proto kind of thing.  It would
> be easier to start off with something like this rather than going
> through scratch.  Some people have done that with Unreal because
> Unreal provides the source to practically everything but the
> underlying network engine and some primitives.

Unreal is ok for prototyping, as well as Quake 3 since you still
have the SDK that let you do lots of things without having to pay
any license fees.  You don't really need a whole system if you're
only doing prototyping or a demo to show to some publishers. Unless,
of course, you want to make a real MMORPG demo with lots of
simultaneously connected users.. but then you can use NeL to do that
since it's got all you need for a showcase... and in case of
prototyping you usually aren't tied to a specific SDK or gaming
system yet.

> Of course I don't know how easy it would be to do real-time
> cutscenes, because the cutscenes could also help with the demo.

I don't know, too.. but I guess you could go with some AVIs in this
case.

> I actually bought Tribes 2.  Crashed it right away after my first
> attempt.  Second time through I finally got the hang of the
> controls.  Ran around for a while checking how the terrain felt.
> I didn't want any bots cause I would have lasted about 1 second
> into the game. So it was a fairly lonely world.

> I like the outdoors for the little that I saw and the nicely lite
> interiors.  I don't mind dungeon crawling, but I also like to see
> things. A few NPCs like Half-Life would have been nice.  Maybe
> they don't have NPCs and its just a PVP environment.

Tribes 2 is a PvP game. There are a few tutorial missions with bots
that show you how to command your marine. Then you're on your own
against other real people.

> But then the question is why T2 over HL or Unreal or Quake 3?
> Monolith is in there somewhere too i guess.

Monolith is offeringa real expensive SDK. They're asking for a
$100,000 base license that can grow if you want to support multiple
platforms.  At the moment I'm evaluating their development system
(LithTech) and I cannot say much about it. The best thing about it
is that it's got a lot of tools to create and edit your models and
animations, and levels also. And they're giving you a full featured
assets manager, where you can load your level and place your
monsters and objects and associate a behaviour to every one of them
and you're set with a fully populated level without having to write
a line of code.

> At this point someone wakes up and ask "why is frank going on and
> on about FPS; doesn't he know this is a mud list and talking about
> MMORPG is more on topic?"

> Ok.  Here is what you can do for 3D mud development with any
> commerical MMORPG: --

I am sure that NeL would fit well in 3D MUD development. It's under
GPL and you can use it freely.. and usually you're going to release
the source code of your MUD, so the GPL license is not giving you
any trouble.

--
c'ya!

Valerio Santinelli
tanis at mediacom.it
HateSeed Gaming Magazine http://www.hateseed.com/
My Lab http://tanis.hateseed.com/
In Flames Italia http://www.inflames.it/


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